Novel: The Maytrees

Overview
Annie Dillard's The Maytrees is a quiet, intimate novel set on the windswept dunes of Provincetown, Massachusetts. It traces the long arc of a marriage between Toby and Lou Maytree, following their shared routines, the small rituals that sustain domestic life, and the sudden rupture when Lou leaves for another life. The tone is spare and observant, marrying precise natural description to subtle psychological insight.
The novel moves through decades with a patient eye, attentive to how time and place shape the contours of love. Dillard's prose is restrained but lyrical, turning details of weather, tides, and household labor into a portrait of two people weathering both affection and estrangement.

Plot Summary
Toby and Lou meet on the Cape and build a life together in a modest house on the edge of the sea. Their days are filled with practical work, small pleasures, and a shared tolerance that deepens into something like devotion. The shoreline and its ever-shifting landscape serve as both backdrop and mirror for the couple's private life, where ordinary acts, baking bread, repairing the house, watching storms, accrue meaning.
A decisive upheaval occurs when Lou departs with another man, leaving Toby to remain in the place they once shared. Years of separation follow, during which both characters adapt to altered circumstances: Lou pursues a different kind of life away from the dunes, and Toby persists in his anchored existence, shaped by solitude and memory. The novel then follows the slow, complicated consequences of that departure, how habits persist, how grief and love coexist, and how two lives continue to intersect across distance and time.

Main Characters
Toby Maytree is steady, practical, and deeply rooted in place. His attachments are often expressed through physical labor and attention to the world around him rather than through overt sentiment. Lou is more restless and curious, with an emotional intensity that both affirms and destabilizes the life she shares with Toby. Their personalities complement and clash, producing a relationship that is at once enduring and vulnerable to sudden change.
Secondary figures appear mainly to illuminate the central couple's choices and to reflect the social world of Provincetown and beyond. These supporting presences underscore the novel's focus on interior lives rather than broad social drama.

Themes and Style
The novel explores love as a practice and as an evolving shape rather than as a single, defining emotion. Themes of departure and return, endurance and resignation, memory and small mercies recur throughout. The coastal setting functions as a metaphor for instability and persistence: tides erase and restore, dunes shift yet remain.
Dillard's style is characterized by precise observation and quiet authority. Sentences are economical but richly textured, often anchoring emotional insight in physical details. The narrative does not dramatize so much as attend, inviting readers to witness how ordinary acts accumulate into a life.

Legacy and Resonance
The Maytrees stands as a distinctive late-career novel from a writer better known for nonfiction and lyrical prose. Its understated approach to passion and loss has earned admiration for its emotional honesty and craft. The book rewards close, patient reading, offering a nuanced meditation on what it means to stay and what it means to leave, and on how the passage of time reshapes the terms of attachment.